Cook channels Jobs: slams Android tablets as 'bizarre'

Tim Cook has shown himself to be a fine substitute for Steve Jobs in terms of day-to-day operations. He also does well at channeling Steve Jobs when it comes to slamming competitive products.

On Tuesday's post-earnings conference call, COO Tim Cook, when asked about competitive tablets, said the following:

Q: What about iPad competitors?

TC: There’s not much out there as you know. There are two kinds of groups today (in the market) — the ones using a Windows-based operating system. They’re big, heavy and expensive. Weak battery life. Need keyboard or stylus. From our point of view, customers aren’t interested in that.

Then you have the Android tablets. The variety shipping today, the OS wasn’t designed for a tablet — but Google said this. So you wind up having the size of a tablet that’s less than reasonable. Or one that’s not even a real tablet experience. It’s a “scaled-up smartphone” – that’s a bizarre product in our view. Those are what is shipping today. If you do a side-by-side with an iPad, some enormous percentage are going to pick the iPad. We have no concern there.

In terms of next generation. There’s nothing shipping yet. So I don’t know. “Today they’re vapor.” However, we’re not sitting still. We have a huge first-mover advantage. And a huge user advantage from iTunes to the App Store. Huge number of apps and an ecosystem. We’re very confident entering into a fight with anyone.

That's the kind of speak that Steve Jobs would be proud of. He once said that a 10-inch screen was the minimal size for a tablet to be effective (which we've pointed out is strange since the iPad is only 9.7-inches in size) and that the 7-inch tablets would be DOA. Clearly, they have not been, although they are not selling at iPad rates.

When speaking about the current Android tablets, Cook is correct in that the Samsung Galaxy Tabs, for example, are using a non-tablet-optimized version of Android: 2.2 (upgradeable to 2.3, we expect).

The ones he calls vapor are the ones that Apple needs to be truly worried about. Examples include the Motorola Xoom, which has a slightly larger screen than the iPad (10.1-inch vs. 9.7-inch) and will run Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), which Google says is tablet-only. It's unclear what the Xoom's exact release date is, but it's definitely Q1, with a 4G version coming in Q2.

Brief looks at Honeycomb have impressed many. It's believed, however, that Honeycomb will not run on the current generation of Android tablets.